I’m slowly learning not to become just a passive recipient of every message I hear in college classrooms. But I’ll admit that I’m a complete and total absorber–a whole-hearted sponge of information, if you will. Sit me down in a college classroom, throw some information at me, and I’ll gladly memorize it and regurgitate it when exam time rolls around.
I think a lot of college students are that way. We get so focused on hurdling the information back at our professors that sometimes we ignore that little voice inside our head that begs us to stand up for ourselves. But standing up for ourselves means disagreement, and disagreement is hard, especially with college professors.
I wasn’t too worried when I initially signed up for a women’s studies class last semester. My professor didn’t waste any time debunking the myth that feminism is just about gender equality. Feminism, as we were learning it, referred to eliminating oppression for all types of people; men, women, people of color, gays, lesbians, immigrants, you name it.
Sounds great, right?
In theory, yes. But that quickly changed when my professor started talking about how some people can get offended by what you say, even when you don’t mean for it to be hurtful. Or worse, people can even get offended by what you say when you genuinely meant well.
I guess I can’t argue with that. I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all been a little bit offended by someone who threw a backhanded compliment or a sarcastic remark at us at least once in our lifetimes. Surely they didn’t mean for it to be offensive. But maybe it was. It happens.
That wasn’t the problem, though. The real problem was when my professor started every one of these conversations with the phrase, “All good intentions aside…” She even invited in a guest speaker once who said that good intentions are 'essentially bullshit'.
Stop right there.
“All good intentions aside”? “Bullshit”? Why? Why should we throw good intentions aside, and why are they “bullshit”?
I got to thinking about where these kinds of phrases generally turn up in conversation. We usually hear them in settings that involve basic social intelligence and political correctness (think; microaggressions, gender pronouns, LGBT labels, etc.). Every homosexual doesn’t like to be referred to as “gay”. Every person of color doesn’t like to be referred to as “black”. Every transgender woman doesn’t like to be referred to as “she”. These preferences are all equally valid, and accordingly, any one of these individuals could have been offended if you called him or her “gay”, “black”, or “she”, even if you didn’t mean any harm.
But the problem with trivializing the intentions of good-natured people is that it creates a culture of people afraid to say anything at all. Some homosexuals do like to be referred to as “gay”. Some people of color do like to be referred to as “black”. Some transgender women do like to be referred to as “she”. We constantly hear millennials being criticized for claiming themselves a victim of everything. We can criticize our own generation all we want, but what we really need to realize is that we can’t expect everyone we come in contact with to immediately know what will and will not offend us. The truth is, most of the time you just don’t know what might or might not offend someone, especially when your relationship is still surface-level. And what do we do in those situations? We rely on our good intentions.
But by silencing good intentions, we’re not really leaving room for anyone to make mistakes in the first place. This includes professionals and educators on these very topics, more than a few of whom (as I have learned) still find themselves fearful of “saying the wrong thing”. And we all know what happens when we don’t make mistakes. (Hint: We don’t learn from them.) When we don’t learn from our mistakes, we can’t fix them. And we all know what happens when we can’t fix our mistakes. (Hint: No one walks away happy.)
I don’t say this as a means to justify the use of racial slurs or derogatory language and claim “ignorance” or “only meaning the best”. There’s a clear boundary between accidentally saying the wrong thing and genuinely having bad intentions. Instead, I’m saying this to emphasize the fact that no one’s good intentions should ever be silenced. Have good intentions. Voice them. If someone is offended by them, learn from it. Don’t put “all good intentions aside”. Trust me, they matter.
